2008-10-31

Known Issues

There is an NEW bug in the underlying Google static maps that causes Blurbbits cross the dateline to appear incorrectly. This was just introduced in April. However we have been struggling for almost a year to provide workarounds (see issues 565 and 596.. ah the joys of APIs and putting Google in your critical path).

Special Characters

Be careful when using special characters for BlurbBits Mapr labels or the &mtitle= parameter. We will handle them correctly but some sharing sites have problems with ' in the title. If you add a ' it will appear in correctly in your BlurbBit title you might run into issues down the road.

We've recently noticed some strange characters that appear in various random feeds, possibly due to cut and paste of text into a document that wasn't expecting it. This can effect the ScratchPad. The ScratchPad does NOT have word wrap enabled so if you see any extra text at the beginning of the line make sure your append it to the previous line, move up on line, use the end key (or move to the end) and use the backspace button to remove extra characters. If you see R| or L| you've gone one too far. Hit Enter or use Ctrl-Z to undo.

Blogger

There are a couple of issues with Publishing Gadgets and Posts. The workarounds are listed, hopefully Blogger will fix them soon.

Copy and Paste. If a BlurbBit is published in a blog post, Blogger will convert all & to &amp; which causes problems if you are copying and pasting the BlurbBit from Blogger into a new blog post. Add &design=true to your blog post (republish and click info) and copy the result out of the i (info) button design mode popup results or paste the code into a text file first and replace all &amp; with & and paste the result into your new post.

At some zoom levels the lines will disappear from the map. Google is working on a fix, the work around is to change zoom levels slightly. This should not effect the result in BlurbBits, it just makes it harder to find things. When editing a long line that crosses 180, sometimes the segment edit points won't appear (they are on the other side of the world). Zoom out and drag a segment end point closer to 180.

BlurbBits Maps

There is a known Static Maps API issue with lines that cross 0 degrees and 180 degrees (ie. go around the world). Break the line into two pieces at one of the above degrees. ie. Add a point at 0,0.001 and then another at 0,-0.001; Both paths can be added to the BlurbBits (as separate paths) and you won't see the difference. Occasionally a line will appear on a zoomed in location coming from the wrong direction. Adding a new line section point closer to the end location seems to fix the problem. Check out blogsmapr blog for some working(and broken) circumnavigation examples.

Remember to keep the number of points under 50 and don't try and add too much detail to your lines. If you are dealing with 0 or 180 crossings add a couple extra points near the crossing. You can imagine it's difficult to know what line you are talking about. Yes there are two points, but is it the short distance between the two, or the round the world distance you are trying to define. Breaking the path into shorter segments makes the path easier to define (for the Static Maps API).

Extracting Images

As you can imagine extracting the first photo (<img tag) can result in some interesting results if someone doesn't know you are looking for them. In the future we are planning some additions which will allow you to tag a photo as the one to extract. We are still trying to figure out a solution to avoid all the random images that sometimes appear (or are added by feed processing) in the feed (link icons, feed email links etc). The easiest thing is to come up with a standard photo you what to appear as your place holder (like a larger size favicon) and place it in your post before the unwanted photo. You can easily hide it by adding style="display:none" to the image tag.

Internet Explorer

If only browsers followed a standard our lives would be MUCH easier. IE removes comments when switching between Edit HTML and Compose mode. You'll only lose your start and end BlurbBit references but it is a pain.

There was an issue with Dynamic GeoBlog maps. Internet Explorer doesn't handle automatic addition of the GeoBlogs Map (it shifted sidebar items). We've changed the code to work around this issue.

IE 6.0 (what are you DOING using such an obsolete insecure and ridiculously slow browser?) causes a major problem with the Blogger Compose mode and is nearly unusable with interactive Google maps.

Well we came up with our first Firefox specific Bug.. in certain situations Iframes (embedded BlurbBits) will swap src (ie. the wrong Iframe gets added). This is particularly noticable with the new Expandable posts and GeoBlog maps. Since the dynamic geoBlog map is the last Iframe to get added it sometimes gets the wrong src (Adsense, another BlurbBit etc). The fix is to reload the page if the GeoBlog map does not appear correctly. You can also use the new dynamic link to popup feature to avoid the issue (no Iframe).